| STRANGERS ON THE SHORE : Luis Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel [for the 'Flickhead' Buñuel-a-thon] |
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| Monday, 01 October 2007 | |
 In 1970, Mexican director Arturo Ripstein made a 50-minute documentary about the life, work and habits of his longtime friend and colleague Luis Buñuel, then resident in Mexico City. Its title was El Naufrago de la Calle de la Providencia - normally translated into English as The Castaway of Providence Street, although naufrago is arguably closer to 'survivor' or, ideally 'shipwrecked' - implying that Buñuel himself had somehow been 'thrown ashore' by the forces of fate. The title is taken from of Buñuel's own works - a screenplay (some sources suggest it might even have been an unproduced theatrical play) co-authored with Luis Alcoriza in the late 1950s, Los Naufragos de la Calle de la Providencia, which eventually became one of the director's most astonishing and controversial masterpieces. But by the time the film - the last feature-length work Buñuel was to make in Mexico - was completed, it was called something else. According to Buñuel (and his ghost-writer Jean-Claude Carriere) in his "auto-"biography My Last Breath, "I remembered a magnificent title that Jose Bergamin had mentioned when he'd talked to me in Madrid the previous year about a play he wanted to write. 'If I saw The Exterminating Angel on a marquee,' I told him, 'I'd go in and see it on the spot.' " In Buñuel's own description, The Exterminating Angel is "the story of a group of friends who have dinner together after seeing a play, but when they go into the living room after dinner, they find that for some inexplicable reason they can't leave." As a "pitch", this 35-word summary is simplicity itself. The film, however, proves infinitely more complex and multi-layered - sufficient to inspire critics to what Buñuel dismissed "symbolic excesses" as its imagery and dialogue were endlessly analysed in search of political allegory and satirical commentary. Buñuel himself had little time for such approaches - as his son Juan Luis commented in a letter to an American critic, "there is not much to explain. The Angel is probably just a repetition of themes which he has used in all his films... obsessions would be the correct word. As to symbolic interpretations, I think there are none... As to the ending, there is really no logical explanation." Bearing all of this in mind, is there really much point in subjecting The Exterminating Angel to further analysis? It would surely be simpler and more direct to merely note that the film is excellent and deserves to be seen, and that anyone who has not yet done so should do so. Or perhaps we should concentrate instead on what Robert Warshow termed "the immediate experience" - examining the subjective sensory and intellectual impact of actually watching the film. On this basis, my personal view is that the first section of The Exterminating Angel - up to the point at which the guests realise that, no matter how much they want to leave, they are unable to do so - is much stronger than that which follows, and comprises one of the most brilliant sequences in the history of cinema. It's in these early scenes - when the guests are restrained more by a form of peer-pressure ("Why haven't we left?" "Because everyone decided to stay." "Is that normal?" "Life is amusing, and strange.") than any kind of metaphysical/supernatural lethargy. This section blends acute, deadpan-hilarious social commentary ("I wish to spare them embarrassment - let's go to their level, to mitigate their conduct a little") with one of the most subtle and piercingly accurate of all movie representations of a dream-state, specifically those dreams in which the sleeper finds himself surrounded by individuals in a similar state of semi-conscious repose. Or - and this would surely be the most "Buñuelian" of responses - perhaps we should take the director's own verdict on his work with a healthy side-order of skeptical bemusement, and attempt draw our own conclusions about the film-maker and his 'obsessions' as revealed by this particular - and particularly revealing - "text." Organised religion is, as ever with Buñuel, front-and-centre in The Exterminating Angel, and he's careful to incorporate a typically blasphemous dig at the Pope during a shimmering dream sequence in which the dreamer (but not the audience) glimpses the pontiff atop what looks like a foggy alp: "Look at the summit! Can you see him?" "The Pope!" "Yes, it is. So solemn and majestic, like a warrior!" The trapped guests - all of them members of the haute-bourgeoisie (one is an architect, another a conductor, another an army-colonel, another an actress) - come across as a God-fearing lot. Likewise Julio (Claudio Brook), the snootiest of the house's staff ("servants become more impertinent every day, he sniffs") and, tellingly, the only one who doesn't flee the premises when he has the chance: "My teachers were Jesuits - good people," he sighs. "Why don't we all pray together?" someone asks when things are looking grim. "If Divine Providence frees us we will offer a Te Deum." Which indeed they do, in the cathedral-set epilogue that provides the film with its climactic twist and final dark joke. But is it indeed 'Divine Providence' which has freed them? Buñuel suggests not - in this film appealing to God is as much of a waste of time as the "cabala" rituals of mystical Judaism ("take the keys... In the cabala, a key is anything which opens the doors of the unknown) , trusting in rationalism ("we're not spellbound! This is not a sorcerer's castle. We will only overcome our plight by cold analysis") or Masonic appeals (cries of "Adonai!!" and, as a desperate last resort, the recitation of the 'unspeakable word' CHIHHOH.) What actually causes the breaking of the "spell" is the realisation by Leticia (Silvia Pinal), the "ferocious" virgin mockingly referred to as the 'Valkyrie' that the participants are locked in a circle or repetition: "Think of how many times we've changed positions during this ... terrible eternity. It's like a chess game. We've made thousands of moves... Yet everything now is exactly as it was then." At Letitia's urging, the events leading up to the 'entrapment' are re-enacted - she realises that only acknowledging the fundamental stasis of their comfortable lives can they break free from it, even if such liberty proves to be only a cruelly temporary reprieve. On closer inspection, however, The Exterminating Angel can easily be interpreted as much more Godly than Buñuel himself (who entitled a chapter of My Last Breath "Still an Atheist... Thank God!") might have intended. Like most theological concepts, 'Providence' means different things to different people - but it can perhaps be summed up as 'care exercised by the supreme being over the universe.' It's true that the 'castaways' suffer considerably over the course of the film - one dies through natural causes ("I'm content. I won't see the extermination," wheezes the hapless Senor Russell), two from their own hand (a lovey-dovey couple who come to see no exit from the living room except death) - but it's surely no accident that their incarceration should occur on Providence Street. Denied access to the house's kitchens, they obtain water by smashing open a pipe in the wall and then, just as starvation is starting to loom as a very real possibility - with it an attendant, unspoken hint of cannibalism - food is provided in the form of three sheep, procured to provide entertainment for the novelty-seeking guests ("Lucia has a flair for such chic surprises!"), who eventually wander placidly into the living-room (thus ensuring their own demise). This fortuitous visitation might perhaps be ascribed to chance - and the maraudings of a small black bear who was also intended to be part of the post-prandial festivities. But chance certainly can't explain the sudden appearance of more sheep - perhaps 20 in number - who are seen flocking into the cathedral (inside which, we deduce, dozens of people have been inertia-trapped for many days) in the film's very final shot. Buñuel seems to have selected Bergamin's title The Exterminating Angel on a (commercial-minded) whim - in My Last Breath he comments that Bergamin told him that "it came... from the Apocalypse [aka Revelation of St John the Divine, final book in the bible] and was therefore in the public domain." The actual source is biblical, but is from the second book of Samuel (24:16): "And when the angel stretched out his hand upon Jerusalem to destroy it, the Lord repented him of the evil, and said to the angel that had destroyed the people, it is enough." In French, the line "the angel that had destroyed the people" is l'Ange exterminateur de la population. The parallel between this verse and the events in Buñuel's film is clear: the guests are to be punished but not destroyed - the sheep arrive just in time to keep them going until they can work out how to break the "spell" - and the same 'reprieve' recurs, albeit on a larger scale, during the cathedral epilogue. With all due respect to Senor Buñuel, I hope this conclusion doesn't count as a "symbolic excess," although - taking into account the rest of his oeuvre - it seems safe to conclude that any endorsement of Divine Providence is, at best, accidental and inadvertent... thank God. Neil Young 30th September/1st October 2007 written for the...  THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL : [9/10] : El angel exterminador : Mex 62 : Luis BUNUEL : 88 mins (BBFC) seen on DVD in Blackpool : 19th/20th September  |
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